Saturday, September 5, 2009

Bad neighbors

Reading Lou's blogpost this morning about a long-term bad neighbor, I was inspired to think of a classic bad neighbor I grew up with--Lil. I don't know her last name, but she was a doozy. Lil was a fuzzy haired biddy who lived next to me when I was growing up on Stirling St. in Philadelphia. She never had a family that I know of, as in a husband or children, and she always seemed old to me, but I guess at one point, she wasn't. It was hard to tell.

She was a dead ringer for Larry of the three stooges, and had a grating voice that made me think of nails on a blackboard. What she said with that voice was more annoying than the mere sound of it though.

Lil was a gossip and a mean-hearted individual. She ridiculed my parents and me, and spent a lot of time getting the other neighbors to gang up on us. For example, my dad loved to plant vegetables in his postage-stamp garden out front. Lil didn't approve; she had chopped down and cemented over her own lawn and put lawn furniture on it. But because she lived on a corner lot, she had a bit of greenery alongside the house as well.

At one point, she called the police and claimed that my father's vegetables (tomatoes, watermelon, cucumbers) had attracted rats. There were certainly rats in the sewer that would come out and munch on the garden, but even without the garden, they were there, and we frequently saw them. Well anyway, the health department bought her argument and made my dad uproot the garden and chop his garden way back.

Frustrated, dad planted hedges all along the borders of his property, such as it was. Then she decided that 3/4" of the hedges belonged to her, and ripped them out, at least the ones on her side. In their place, she put a full trashcan full of garbage, right under our window, in the middle of summer, and we didn't have an air conditioner.For the record, it is very very hot in Philadelphia, very humid, miserable. Hell. There are frequent thunderstorms, and one is always hopeful that they will cool things off, but they don't. Even when it is raining, it's still hot as hell, and afterwards, it's worse.

About Me

It feels odd to tell people, when they ask you what you do, that you are a poet. It is of course not a proper profession, if by "proper" one means a job that brings in money.
It is most certainly an occupation though. Reading, writing, going to poetry events make up a sizable percentage of my life.